On our fifth day sailing, I woke up early to see the sun rise over Costa Rica. The captain saw me standing at the bow of the ship and said, “Look down.” Just below the water’s surface a small school of dolphins swam alongside the ship, catching a ride in its wake. They undulated and leaped. They flashed what looked like dolphin smiles, and at times it seemed as if they were leading us. Then just as quickly they disappeared.
“They’ve probably gone to get something to eat,” said Dan Dion, the captain of the Sea Lion.
Dolphins at starboard, brown pelicans dive-bombing into the sea and white hawks circling overhead were common on our eight-day voyage aboard the ship. On our daily trips ashore we were disappointed if we didn’t see capuchin or squirrel monkeys swing overhead or a shy agouti—a rodent the size of a small lamb—munch in the undergrowth. Sometimes we circled rocky islands in inflatable zodiac boats, binoculars pasted to our eyes to spy on birds fighting midair over food or nesting on the rocks, all to a deafening symphony of squeals and cries.
Bill and I had come to Costa Rica to see “ecotourism” at one of its birthplaces. Ecotourism is a clunky name for a movement begun several decades ago to put the brakes on industrial-strength tourism and return to a form of travel that doesn’t spoil or disfigure a country’s landscape, people or society. When I first told friends I was writing a book about the tourism industry, they assumed I would concentrate on ecotourism. In many people’s minds, ecotourism is to regular travel what local organic farming is to factory farming. And they think it is sweeping the planet; it is not. In the most optimistic measures, ecotourism or its sister practices of geotourism, sustainable tourism and responsible tourism make up no more than 8 percent of travel. The reason is simple: its aims often clash with industry goals for high volume and profits. And that makes it very difficult to pull off, even in Costa Rica.
To measure those differences and difficulties, Bill and I visited Costa Rica by ship, aboard the National Geographic’s Sea Lion on a voyage organized by Lindblad Expeditions. I wanted to compare an ecocruise with the commercial cruise we had taken aboard the Royal Caribbean Navigator of the Seas in December 2009. During our cruise in March 2011 we first passed through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic side to the Pacific Ocean and then headed north up the coast from Panama to Costa Rica.
Every day we either went ashore to hike in the forests or snorkeled in the sea or zipped around the islands in a zodiac motor boat. To find pristine areas, our ship followed an itinerary of protected parks—national parks, private parks, regional parks.
The ship carries only sixty passengers and offers no room service, no casinos, no nighttime entertainment and no television in the cabins. That doesn’t mean we suffered at all. The meals were extraordinary and the company amiable. We were also pleasantly exhausted from the day’s excursions. Above all, we were surrounded by nature, exuberant nature.
We also could have booked into an “ecolodge” in the middle of a jungle and taken excursions hiking through Costa Rica’s rainforests, climbing around its volcanoes. Alternately we could have chosen to get drenched white-water rafting in its rivers, surfing on the Pacific Coast or simply relaxing on its beaches. The country advertises itself as “Costa Rica—No Artificial Ingredients.”
It’s not that simple, but as a slogan, it’s not entirely wrong. What is missing is the ups and downs in Costa Rica’s recent history that not only gave birth to ecotourism but created a counter-movement that gave Costa Rica the highest rate of deforestation in the entire Western Hemisphere for nearly two decades.
• • •
Ecotourism may sound like a squishy, feel-good concept, yet there are new international guidelines defining what it means to be a responsible, sustainable tourist company or destination. Those guidelines were recently hammered out by the Global Sustainable Tourism Council made up of representatives from United Nations agencies, private companies and environmentalists. I took along that list of guidelines.
Isabel Salas was our expedition leader. A biologist trained at the University of Costa Rica, she has the air of a female Indiana Jones, a no-nonsense curiosity about the natural world of her native Costa Rica and a gentle sense of humor. Her professional specialty is the social and sexual life of the howler monkey, the swift dark simian with a small gorilla face and a voice from the grave.
Our guides were as much a part of the ecotourism phenomenon as the landscape. They fulfilled the requirements to employ locals in high positions and provide visitors with knowledge about natural surroundings, local culture and cultural heritage. (This was the opposite of our Royal Caribbean trip, where they offered seminars on shopping for diamonds and other jewelry and nothing about Mexico or Belize where we docked.)
Four of the five naturalist guides were Costa Rican—the fifth was from Panama. They were scientists and locals; they could see the flash of a bird’s wing in the thickest forest, then tell us not only the name of the bird but its mating habits, favorite food and where it fit in the life of the rainforest. After a day’s adventure—hiking through the jungle, swimming in the bay or touring the islands in our zodiac boats—we would catch our breath, change into dry clothes, and gather for informal discussion led by Salas or one of the other naturalists. With slides and movies, postings of the birds and fishes, they would review what we’d seen and experienced that day and preview what was in store the next. It was somewhere between an exquisite hike and a sweaty classroom, at least what I wish my science classes had been like.
We crossed into the Panama Canal our first night of the voyage, our ship a bathtub-size toy boat compared to the mighty tankers and freighters that surrounded us. Each step up the watery ladder of the canal’s locks was masterfully climbed as the ships rose to the height of a man-made lake created when the United States dug the canal bridging the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in 1914. The next morning we crossed that lake and docked at an island called Barro Colorado, a rare wilderness officially managed by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. We would hike up the side of one of the hills with guides who are scientists at the institute. They told us that the island is normally off-limits to visitors; Lindblad is the only organization permitted to bring tourists to the island—another benefit of signing on to the Sea Lion.
That first hike was a stretch, getting our legs accustomed to climbing trails in the tropical heat while showing enthusiasm for small wonders like the ants crossing our trail in single file, each holding a corner of a green leaf that waved in the heat like a geisha’s fan. Even with the thick canopy of trees we were literally dripping with sweat. Then, when I felt like fainting, we heard our first troop of howler monkeys. Two adults and two children perched on the highest branches of a tree swung into action at the sound of our footsteps, answering our arrival with their deep-throated howls that flooded the woods.
That night we passed through the canal, and in the morning we were on the Pacific Ocean, taking slow Zodiac boat rides around rugged rock islands in the Las Perlas Archipelago, where fishermen once dove for pearls. Now these desolate outposts are nesting homes to thousands of frigatebirds, pelicans and brown and blue-footed boobies. Against the clear blue skies off the Pacheca and Pachequilla islands, they swarmed in search of food and mates. When the males weren’t vying for the attention of females with aerial acrobatics or deep dives into the sea, the birds were engaged in aerial combat. The elegant black frigates maneuvered like cocky fighter-jet pilots encircling the slow-moving brown pelicans until the frightened pelicans dropped the food from their pouches and the frigates swooped in to steal the fish.
That night we watched the sole movie shown during our trip: David McCullough narrating a PBS special based on his book about the building of the Panama Canal. I felt like I was part of a New Yorker cartoon about politically correct travel. Yet the three teenagers aboard stayed until the very end. After dinner the passengers walked on the deck and stared at the stars, gathered in the lounge below or retired to their rooms. No nights of karaoke or dance contests.
Before leaving the Panamanian coast we dropped anchor in the Gulf of Chiriquí at Coiba National Park. A rare refuge for threatened species like the crested eagle, this park is known as a spectacular site for scuba diving, with 760 species of well-protected marine fish, 33 species of shark and acres of live coral reefs. We snorkeled in the warm waters, weaving our way through schools of yellowtail surgeonfish, rays, zebra morays, the pencil-thin trumpetfish, and—my favorite—the spotted boxfish that look as if they were wearing organza party dresses. It was like swimming in an aquarium. Never had Bill or I been so close to nature and so at ease. We were outnumbered by these glorious fishes, guests in their world.
This was the moment when I understood the huge appeal of ecotourism. We were the only boat in sight. Only ships that leave the area as they found it receive approval for passage from the Panamanian national park system. In this case, that meant leaving the waters and beaches pristine and unspoiled, without polluting sewage or fuel or crowds. By definition, that excludes large modern cruise ships.
We had sailed into paradise. If we had arrived a few years earlier, we would have found something closer to hell. Until 2004 the island had been the heavily fortified penal colony known as Coiba Prison. Panama emptied it after eighty years of operation in this isolated area and turned the islands and marine area into a national park.
Lunch was a picnic on the beach, followed by two more hours to swim and snorkel. By the time we returned to the ship, the sun was beginning to set in bands of soft pink and yellow and my arms felt like worn rubber bands from the hours chasing fish.
Our next stop was Costa Rica, birthplace of ecotourism.
• • •
Isabel Salas said environmentalism is bred into her fellow citizens. “We grow up with conservation, knowing the names of trees and animals,” she told me over morning coffee. “We’ve had so much time to think about conservation, not like our neighbors with their wars. We’ve had no army since 1948.”
That year President José Figueres Ferrer abolished the military and redirected its funds to the police force, education, cultural preservation and the environment. Salas can be forgiven for bragging about that prescient move. Thirty years later it helped save Costa Rica from being involved in the bloody wars that engulfed its northern neighbors. This wasn’t the only time Costa Rica had been the odd country out in Central America.
Costa Rica was the poorest of the Spanish colonies in Central America, relegated to the sidelines of history for several centuries. Christopher Columbus mistakenly named the area Costa Rica or rich coast in the belief that gold was buried in its hills. He was wrong. The volcanic mountain chains that rib the narrow country are home to multiple microclimates and countless species of flora and fauna but not gold. So the land proved uninviting to Spanish investors and entrepreneurs who preferred Nicaragua.
Eventually, in the mid nineteenth century, the colonialists cleared some land for coffee plantations, and coffee beans became Costa Rica’s chief cash crop. But much of the land remained a wilderness. About the same time, European scientists started arriving, drawn to Costa Rica by popular scientific books about the extraordinary diversity of species in the small nation’s jungles—then and now an extraordinary biodiversity that has become the country’s distinguishing attribute.
Among these foreigners were two German physicians who moved to Costa Rica to practice medicine. Carl Hoffmann and Alexander von Frantzius were naturalists who had watched the woods in their own country cut down for lumber and energy during the age of industrialization. The two physicians spent their weekends hiking through the jungles of Costa Rica and exploring its mountains. They collected specimens in a thorough, scientific fashion, helping raise awareness of the breadth of Costa Rica’s wildlife. Dr. Frantzius catalogued the country’s mammals and Dr. Hoffmann did the first extensive study of the country’s bats. Their names live on in places like Cerro Frantzius and animals like Hoffmann’s woodpecker.
Their greatest achievement, though, was teaching natural history to the young students of Costa Rica, initiating the studies that eventually made Costa Rica the center of academic tropical research in Central America. Dr. Frantzius used the backroom of his pharmacy as a classroom and laboratory, educating the country’s first tropical biologists and researchers. By teaching Costa Ricans the science of the forest, the two physicians and the European and American scholars who followed them, taught them the value of the wilderness. This in turn reinforced Costa Ricans’ resolve to reject blandishments in the early twentieth century to clear-cut forests to create more plantations. Their answer was that the forests were worth more standing than if they were cut down for lumber or cleared for cultivation.
These foreign scientists in turn trained more and more Costa Ricans, who became great naturalists themselves, until the country grew to become a center of the conservation movement in the Western Hemisphere. Alberto Manuel Brenes Mora, one of the brightest young Costa Rican naturalists trained in the early 1900s, was a pioneer in the study of the country’s 1,200 species of orchids.
By 1940 the country had created the University of Costa Rica from four schools of higher learning. In the decades that followed, the university excelled in the study of tropical rainforest preservation, and success followed success. The Organization of American States established an institute for agricultural sciences in Costa Rica to teach wildlife management and forest conservation. There, Leslie Holdridge, the pioneering ecologist, taught some of Costa Rica’s finest naturalists. (He was so dedicated to conservation that he purchased a tract of rainforest named La Selva to better study tropical systems.)
One of his star pupils was Gerardo Budowski, a Venezuelan student who exemplifies how academics led naturally to ecotourism. After Budowski completed his studies in Costa Rica, he earned a doctorate in forestry in 1961 at Yale and returned to Costa Rica to teach and practice conservation. He was recruited by the United Nations to take part in the then-new program of conservation and ecology. His achievements eventually included becoming the president of the International Ecotourism Society in 1992. This scientific tradition, begun nearly one hundred years ago, is responsible for educating Costa Rica’s large pool of conservationists and naturalists like Isabel Salas.
To this day Costa Rica can boast a stunning diversity of flora and fauna in a country slightly smaller than the state of West Virginia. Costa Rica has more species of birds than the United States and Canada combined, more butterfly species than the entire continent of Africa, and as a “biological superpower” boasts 200 reptile species, 208 mammal species and an astonishing 35,000 insect species.
More astounding, small Costa Rica is home to 5 percent of the world’s biodiversity, thanks in considerable degree to its conservation habits. The national parks and private reserves cover more than one-fourth of the country. Forests are known in Costa Rica as the “lungs of the cities” that keep the air and water clean and protect the soil. Proportionately, Costa Rica has more protected lands—national parks and private reserves—than even the United States.
The marriage of ecotourism to the natural sciences was a natural fit. Ecotourism could not exist without the forest, the birds, the animals, the wild landscapes. And in theory, money earned from ecotourism protects the wilderness. This concept wasn’t an easy sell, not even in Costa Rica. Many people saw “ecotourism” as a thin basis for modern economic development. I got a hint of the close calls in recent Costa Rican history that nearly buried the prospects of ecotourism.
Late one afternoon we were slowly circling the forested Golfo Dulce Bay in our Zodiac speedboats, hoping to see monkeys come out after the heat of the day. On this outing José Calvo, another Costa Rican naturalist, was our guide. Birds were roosting in the trees. Calvo thought he heard the cry of a howler. He lifted his binoculars to a thick blue-green patch of trees and saw them—a troop of howler monkeys with an elusive squirrel monkey by their side. “An orphan,” said Calvo. Somehow the howlers managed to munch on the tender leaves of trees above the mangroves while bursting out their fantastic screeches. On one branch a baby clung to her mother’s back. We applauded him for finding the monkeys.
“When I was growing up, you could see monkeys everywhere. There were pet monkeys on the street corner doing tricks. Especially capuchin monkeys because they are so smart. They train easily. Today you never see them anywhere. So many were killed that now it’s illegal to capture them,” said Calvo. “It’s also illegal to cut down the mangrove forests.”
That protection came only after years of a tug of war over what made the most sense to improve Costa Rica’s economy. At first, the monkeys and forests lost in Costa Rica’s race to improve livelihoods and figure out what kind of country it would become. After an early spate of conservationism a new president changed course in the 1970s and 1980s and removed several key regulations, opening the way for ranchers to buy up and clear land for cattle. The ranchers had their eye on the growing appetite in the United States for beef: Americans were consuming hamburgers at a remarkable rate. Fast food was no longer just a convenience food but a staple. Costa Rican policy-makers and ranchers wanted to cash in on the trend and export beef to the United States.
Chain saws and bulldozers cleared nearly one-third of the land for pastures in those two decades, earning Costa Rica the distinction of having the highest rate of deforestation in the Western Hemisphere. Beef became the country’s major export: 36 million tons were sold to the United States in 1985. The shift to intensive cattle ranching not only changed the economy but the country’s self-image as well, from a wilderness sanctuary to a home of modern ranchers. The period became known as the “hamburgerization” of Costa Rica.
The conservationists didn’t give up. They already had a solid foothold in the country with the national park system Costa Rica created in 1960 patterned after that in the United States. It was augmented by private reserves scattered around the country. At the beginning these private tracts had been purchased by foreigners entranced by the country’s beauty. Among the pioneers in this movement was a group of American Quakers who left the United States in 1951 in protest of their country’s role in the Korean War. Pacifists, they immigrated to Costa Rica because it had abolished its army three years earlier. They bought 3,000 acres of cloud forest in the Tilarán Mountains of Costa Rica’s north central highlands in the belief that the weather was ideal for dairy farming. They had cut down half of the forests for pasture when they realized in horror that in doing so they had jeopardized their water supply. So they left the other half of their land in wilderness: cooled by mist and wind much of the year, the cloud forests were thick with foliage every shade of green. Moss enveloped stones and dripped from branches. All of it was fed by cold streams as clear as glass. They named it the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve.
Following the Costa Rican tradition, the Quakers invited scientists to do research at the Cloud Forest Reserve. The scientists, in turn, spread the word about the beauty of the area and soon tourists arrived. The first bed-and-breakfast inns opened in the early 1950s. From this modest beginning Monteverde became one of the birthplaces of ecotourism in Costa Rica. The reserve grew, through land leases for scientific research in the 1970s and land purchases by American philanthropists for conservation purposes. Today it covers over 26,000 acres. Ecotourism grew along with it.
The preserve inspired an adjacent preserve. In the late 1980s a Swedish schoolteacher visited Monteverde and was upset at the noticeable degradation of the forests on the edge of the preserve. She went home with a mission. She convinced the young students in her school to help her raise enough money to buy up land to act as a buffer for Monteverde and save that paradise. The nine-year-old students collected enough Swedish kronor to buy 35 acres; once news of the campaign spread, children from Japan, the United States and Europe canvassed their family and friends, eventually raising millions of dollars and creating the Children’s Eternal Rainforest, which encompasses 17,500 acres.
Now the tourists were arriving by the thousands. Just off the reserve, boutique hotels called ecolodges were built that adhered to the conservation ethic of low impact on the environment and centered on the natural wilderness surrounding them. Multiply Monteverde by the hundreds and you have an idea of how nature tourism became an important industry for Costa Rica. Since ecotourism required more and more protected wilderness, that industry piggybacked off of the government’s push to build a national park system throughout the country.
In the 1980s, events beyond its borders threatened this peaceful progression. Nicaragua, its northern neighbor, was being torn apart in a civil war that pitted a leftist government pledged to helping peasants against rightist rebels who saw the government as an extension of Cuban communism and sponsored by the United States. Soldiers from both sides sought refuge on the Costa Rican side of the border. War was also exploding in El Salvador, except in this case the rebels were leftists fighting a rightist military government. Assassinations of civilians were common, including the notorious murder of the Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero. Costa Rica worried that the wars could spill over as they had in Vietnam and engulf their country one way or another.
Costa Ricans elected Óscar Arias Sánchez as their president in 1986. Sensing the mood of his country, Arias set off to help end the war. He presented a peace plan to resolve the conflicts, relying, he said, on Costa Rica’s moral authority as a neighbor without an army. The plan led to a peace accord the next year and Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Somehow, that prize helped affirm Costa Rica’s identity. The country was developing a reputation as a peaceful, conservationist-minded niche nation. Costa Ricans confirmed that direction for their country when the price of beef fell in the 1990s and Costa Rica’s cattle ranches became less profitable. Agriculture seemed less attractive, and over the next five years, traditional farming and ranching lost their premier economic position to the new leaders: tourism, especially ecotourism, and computer and biomedical technology. The small country has averaged over 2 million foreign tourists every year, quite a number considering that Costa Rica’s population is 4.5 million. And most of those tourists come from the United States.
• • •
Becky Timbers was seated in a lotus position every morning as she welcomed us at sunrise for thirty minutes of stretches. We gathered on the covered upper deck, passengers of varying skill and flexibility, to be gently led by Timbers through a series of modified yoga positions. She had the nimbleness of a ballet dancer. Bill, on the other hand, got stuck on some of the first positions. But he didn’t give up. This was his first attempt at anything resembling yoga, and although he swore yoga wasn’t for him, the fresh morning air and calm nature of the class convinced him otherwise. Throughout the cruise he showed up every morning for the stretches before breakfast.
Timbers is from Vermont, a college graduate with an itch to travel. She started out as a steward, or housekeeper, and worked her way up to the ship’s “wellness expert,” which involves, among other things, holding classes and giving massages.
Most important for the standards of sustainable tourism, or ecotourism, Timbers is an American, as are all of her fellow crew members from the captain to the stewards. National Geographic is headquartered in the United States and the vast majority of the passengers are American. So, in contrast to the large commercial cruise ship companies, the Sea Lion is registered and flagged in the United States. Its port home is Seattle. The ship recruits Americans, pays American wages and follows American regulations and standards. The wages are significantly higher than those on big cruise ships. Timbers said she is paid $140 a day on a six-month contract, and added that, as a steward, she was paid roughly $100 a day, or twice as much per day as a steward on a Royal Caribbean ship earned in a month.
The Sea Lion fulfills the guidelines’ requirement that locals are hired and paid living wages: an American ship with American crew also employs Costa Rican and Panamanian naturalists. It is not flagged and registered in a country like Liberia to avoid environmental and labor laws.
“It’s hard to get these jobs,” Timbers said. “I was lucky.”
The mood on the ship reflected that difference. The crew was not obsequious; there were no complaints about wages and pleas for high tips to supplement a miserable wage. And on our vacation it mattered to Bill and me that we were around people who were properly compensated for their hard work.
Translating the sustainable ecotourism requirements for the cruise meant local hires at the home port and local hires for the countries we visited. On that score, Isabel said she was just as pleased with her role. “I have been with Lindblad Expeditions since 1997 and I believe we Costa Rican naturalists are best at guiding visitors to our country.”
How much did all of this sustainable ecotourism cost?
On the face of it, this was a much more expensive trip. It cost $4,800 for each of us for eight days with everything included—food, all of our expeditions on shore and the premium for traveling through the Panama Canal. Tolls to go through the canal can be steep. The Disney Magic cruise liner paid $283,400 in toll fees in 2008. Our small cruise ship was charged far less, but the toll was passed on to us in the higher expedition cost.
For the same amount of money Bill and I could have stayed in a deluxe suite aboard the Royal Caribbean Allure of the Seas for a seven-day cruise in the Caribbean at $3,349 per person. (Instead we stayed in a room with balcony for a five-day cruise.) There is no question that we couldn’t afford this trip very often, compared to commercial cruises.
For us the Sea Lion was the bargain. There was no comparison between the experiences aboard the Royal Caribbean ship, which was largely a crowded floating hotel, and those on the Sea Lion, which actually took us on a voyage to foreign countries with the greatest of luxuries in the twenty-first century—actual experiences in the disappearing wilderness. We could have stayed in an ecolodge for far less money, but then we wouldn’t have had the breadth of the seagoing experience.
There was more than a touch of luxury aboard the Sea Lion, especially at mealtime. The dining room was no more than comfortable, an “intimate” space with old-fashioned round tables covered in standard-issue white linens and the sound of the sea seeping through the portholes. The décor was 1950s practical, nothing like the high-end dining room on the Royal Caribbean ship. But the food—that was something else. Gary Jenanyan, the executive consulting chef for National Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions, traveled on our cruise, supervising spicy huevos rancheros for breakfast and a light pineapple cream for dessert later at dinner. Whenever we landed near a local market, he sent a crew member off to buy fresh fish, vegetable and fruits. More than a few of the meals would have earned praise in a restaurant guide, reflecting Gary’s decades-long service as head of the Great Chefs program at the Robert Mondavi Winery and personal chef to Mondavi. Instead, the local food earned more good marks for buying and cooking local.
We weren’t assigned seats at mealtime. Instead, we mixed and eventually spoke with most of the other passengers and found a few whose company we especially enjoyed. This was a self-selected group of people from around the country who consciously chose a vacation because it was a rare trip through a wilderness. There was the tree farmer from Moweaqua, Illinois, who saved much of his old-growth forest and sold what others considered waste lumber on the Internet, making a very nice living. Also on board was a National Park forest ranger and her chemist husband, who chose the voyage because “National Geographic believes in protecting the land and leaving it as you find it.” A British entrepreneur came on the trip to take photographs of wildlife for his professional website. Finally, we met a nurse whose husband had just abandoned her, forcing her to sell her home alongside a national park in North Carolina. She told me it was worth spending $4,000 on the voyage: “I came on this trip to see paradise before I have to start my new life.”
On the fourth night of our trip we sailed to the Osa Peninsula on Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, one of the most celebrated ecotourist spots in the country, with beaches that qualify as a slice of paradise. We began the next morning with a wet landing, climbing out of the Zodiac boats as best we could on the beach. The smell of the sea was as sharp as metal, pure salt and humidity without an overlay of pollution.
Once on the beach, we had a choice of riding horses or hiking through the jungle. Horses were waiting for us on the sand. Bill and I chose a morning hike.
The peninsula is in the southwest corner of Costa Rica. It is shaped like a crab’s claw, sheltering the Golfo Dulce to the east, where we had visited a tropical garden the day before. This time we were traveling around the western side of the peninsula, up the lush Pacific Ocean shoreline with mangroves dripping into the sea and untamed beaches framed by dense jungles. The foliage was a study in every shade of green and blue. This was the magnificent Corcovado National Park, which covers nearly half of the Osa Peninsula. Experts have called it the crown jewel of the Costa Rican park system. Few other spots on Earth can claim more diverse flora and fauna than Corcovado. The park is home to the last old-growth rainforests on the Pacific Coast of Central America and naturalists compare it favorably to the Amazon Basin and the deepest forests of Malaysia and Indonesia.
Keeping it that way has not been easy. This is also one of the few areas in Costa Rica where gold was found, centuries after Christopher Columbus misnamed the country. International mining companies bought up much of the land surrounding the park and ‘oreros,’ or gold panhandlers, continued working in the forests, polluting the streams and killing the wild animals for food. International logging companies were about to clear-cut wide swaths of the area until Costa Rica named it a national park in 1975, earning then-President Daniel Oduber the Albert Schweitzer Award for preserving the habitat of animals in the park.
Over the next decades, the government, supported by money and expertise from philanthropies as varied as the Corcovado Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, Catholic Relief Services and the World Wildlife Fund, has tried varying strategies to protect the park. First, officials created jobs for local Costa Ricans in ecotourism to discourage logging or gold panhandling. Then they hired more park rangers to make sure poachers and panhandlers stayed out. So far, they have saved the hermit crabs, tapirs, jaguars, pumas and ocelots and the local villagers have been able to prosper from tourism.
As one conservationist said, Costa Rica is a laboratory in ecology, not an “eco-topia.”
After lunch we sailed farther up the coast and landed at San Pedrillo on the northern tip of the park for our afternoon hike. We climbed a steep, rutted path that wound with sharp angles up the hills, leading to a waterfall. Sweating, we dove into its shimmering pool and splashed for half an hour surrounded by rainforest. Sounds perfect and it nearly was, but this was a group of strangers thrown together, so there were bound to be a few irritating encounters among us. One passenger monopolized our guide by speaking to him in colloquial Spanish that few of us could follow. There was a small rebellion to end that. At another point a passenger decided she could answer our questions better than our Costa Rican guide. The guide diplomatically cut her off.
The Osa Peninsula is something of a showpiece for ecotourism on Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast and is routinely used as an example of best practices as well as a reason to prevent the rest of the coast from being developed with chock-a-block high-density motels. To make that point, the Center for Responsible Travel, headquartered in Washington, D.C., published a survey in 2011 showing that Costa Ricans working at ecolodges as housekeepers, kitchen staff and groundskeepers earn an average of $709 each month, nearly twice as much as other workers in the region, whose average income is $357. And the people working in ecolodges were far more likely to be from the Osa region than those in other jobs, who were imported from other regions and willing to work for less money.
The survey also questioned the tourists. The majority said they came to Osa to enjoy the wilderness and said they considered themselves people who “were concerned about traveling in ways that are socially and environmentally responsible.” They said their vacations in Osa were a “good value,” and would have been willing to pay more than the $42 fee charged to visit Corcovado National Park. That study and many others have linked Costa Rica’s successful ecotourism industry with the fact that Costa Rica stands out as the wealthiest nation in Central America, with a high rate of literacy and good health care system.
Foreign hotels and tour operators have taken note of the popularity and profitability of Costa Rica’s ecotourism market and have bought up considerable land there to build their own hotels. I witnessed how valuable that tourism has become during a maneuver at the highest diplomatic level. In 2003, Costa Rica was one of five Central American countries negotiating a new trade agreement with the United States called the Central American Free Trade Agreement or CAFTA. Just as the agreement was to be announced at a public press conference, Costa Rica bowed out, in part because the United States refused to drop its demand that Costa Rica open up its tourist trade to foreign corporations, giving up some control of its coastline and its emphasis on ecotourism. That public standoff was my first introduction to the power of ecotourism. (In fact, that was the first time I had ever written the word “ecotourism” in an article.) I was covering the negotiations as the New York Times international economics correspondent and I had never seen a country walk away from a U.S. trade deal at the last minute. The other four countries signed the accord. Costa Rica waited one year before signing, after negotiating the removal of the threat to its tourism industry.
Back on the ship the crew had organized a display of local handicrafts for sale in what they called the “global marketplace.” On sale were baskets handwoven from native grasses by indigenous women; jewelry crafted by local artists; and blouses and shirts sewn by native seamstresses. I bought a necklace for a gift.
This was straight out of the how-to list for responsible ecotourism: “The Company offers the means for local small entrepreneurs to develop and sell sustainable products that are based on the area’s nature, history, and culture.”
Our last day was a reminder of how fortunate we had been sailing through the wilderness with few other humans nearby. During the night we had sailed past the old banana-exporting port of Quepos and anchored in Drake Bay opposite the Manuel Antonio National Park. This is one of Costa Rica’s smallest preserves as well as one of its most popular. We learned why when we landed on its shores before nine o’clock that morning, ahead of the hundreds of tourists expected that day and in time to see the monkeys playing around in the cool of the morning before the heat sent them off to siesta.
The capuchin monkeys swung around to greet us on the first leg of our hike. There are no fierce predators threatening these and the other mammals at the park, and plenty of tourists feed these irresistible creatures. Our fellow travelers were helpless in the face of the capuchins, with their famous monk-colored coats, long sinuous tails and sensitive pale faces. They snapped photographs and took videos of the capuchins, muttering that the monkeys were so “curious” or “intelligent” or “playful” or “adorable” until the guides said “Enough” and we continued up the path.
Capuchin monkeys and the colorful toucan birds are practically mascots of the Costa Rica park system. Thanks to them and the other wild critters, the number of foreign visits has skyrocketed over the last thirty years. The National Parks Service was only created in 1977, yet foreign tourism took off immediately. From 1985 to 1991, visits to the park quadrupled from 63,500 to 273,400 foreign tourists. A few years later in 1995 tourism eclipsed coffee and bananas as the top income earner in Costa Rica. Today the wilderness parks help draw the more than 2 million foreign tourists to Costa Rica every year. While Costa Rica is universally praised for its decision to live in “peace with nature,” pioneer ecotourism, prohibit oil exploration and protect its tropical rainforest, that doesn’t mean that all of the tourism hotels and lodges in the country are so respectful of nature. To sort out which places were truly “ecotourist” establishments, the government created a Certification for Sustainable Tourism program that evaluates and scores all types of hotels in the country.
On our hike back down to the beach, the monkeys put on a show for our last walk through the jungle. Howlers screamed to the heavens and capuchins swung over to the trail, jumping from tree limb to tree limb until they disappeared inside the green forest wall of trees and vines. How could you ever tire of these jungles, especially when you had a comfortable ship anchored off the coast to welcome you after the daily excursion with a warm shower, comfortable bed for a nap, and a delicious meal?
That night at dinner we sat at a table with Isabel and with Mike and Judy, a couple from Seattle—my old hometown—and discovered we had friends in common. At breakfast on Saturday we said goodbye to Jane, an artist from Stow, Massachusetts, whose cabin was near ours on the small boat. We climbed into a bus for our ride to San Juan and our flight home, passing new villas along the way that were second homes for foreigners, a key concern in Costa Rica as it is in France and Britain.
Waiting at the airport, I reviewed all the categories for sustainable tourism. The Sea Lion passed them all. Its greatest triumph was in category D: “Maximize benefits to the environment and minimize negative impacts.” The Sea Lion actions were impeccable, especially for “conserving biodiversity, ecosystems and landscapes.” No wildlife were captured, consumed or traded. The naturalists were so keen on this rule that we were forbidden to collect shells. Isabel gave a shout-out to Riley, a teenager from Texas, who photographed a quirky collage of shells in place and left them scattered on the sand rather than pocket them.
Beyond our individual journey, the company supports local environmental groups as well as the daunting goal of creating a “panther path,” a wide swath of protected areas from Mexico through Panama to give the great panthers room to survive. Its website contains a “commitment to sustainable travel” section describing how it does business and the local groups it supports.
After this experience I think I trust the National Geographic, but how about all the other groups and hotels that say they are sustainable, or “green,” in Costa Rica? Upscale hotels like the Four Seasons Resort and Spa in northwest Costa Rica charge as much as $2,000 a night, advertising “eco-activities,” a neighboring dry tropical forest and two “unspoiled beaches” along with an Arnold Palmer Golf Course, a spa, paddleboats and tennis. Is this ecotourism? Or is it more like the J. W. Marriott Guanacaste Resort and Spa built in the same region on the Pacific Ocean, with classic spa, gym and restaurants, yet claiming only to be luxurious, not an ecoestablishment.
In most surveys tourists say they will pay a little extra for vacations that respect the environment. Governments have given subsidies to hotels to make them environment-friendly. This adds up to big business in calling yourself “green.” Not surprisingly, hotels and destinations around the world are now advertising themselves as just that: green.
Companies now talk about the triple bottom line—profit, people and the planet—especially in the tourism industry. At Abu Dhabi’s World Green Tourism conference a debate broke out over the definition of “green.”
“How can some of these places pretend they are green? Building more hotel rooms that use less air-conditioning; that’s not green, it’s using less energy. Being green is much more than that,” said Gopinath Parayil, founder of Blue Yonder, an ecotourism venture in South India that has more awards than it can count. “This is more green-washing.”
When it was his turn on stage, Parayil showed how his travel group helped revive traditional Kerala arts and music, clean up rivers, restore four-hundred-year-old homes and recover local history—all the while making a profit.
The hotel executives were just as confident singing the praises of their operations by defining “green” to fit their own situation. The tourism industry is filled with confusing claims of environmental stewardship based on little more than changing towels less frequently and therefore saving water.
Groups have tried giving out certificates for green tourism, responsible tourism, geotourism and ethical tourism in a piecemeal fashion, and it has been difficult to know who is backing these certificates. Some “green labels” are patent lies; others are simply disingenuous, because there is no certificate or uniform standards to distinguish who is genuine. Businesses that adhere to high standards fear that if such a certificate is introduced, they will be undercut by competitors who lie about their environmental credentials.
A group of tourism experts and international organizations set out to solve this problem and found a champion in Ted Turner. He agreed to underwrite the creation of the certificate that would be as respected as the Michelin star system for restaurants.
Few people could have been more welcome than the glamorous businessman from Atlanta, with deep pockets and an impressive record as an innovative entrepreneur, founder of CNN, the first cable news network, as well as Turner Classic Movies, owner of the Atlanta Braves baseball team—the list is endless. He used his wealth for conservation and philanthropy. Turner bought 2 million acres of land in the United States, putting most of it under conservation easement; he is the single largest private landowner in the U.S.
Turner headlined a press conference in Barcelona in October 2008 at which the certificate effort was announced. Standing with officials from U.N. agencies, environment groups and businesses, Turner said he was putting his money and prestige behind the world’s first gold standard for ecotourism, or sustainable tourism.
Turner portrayed the new initiative as a commonsense approach that was in line with good business practices. “Sustainability is just like the old business adage: you don’t encroach on the principal, you live off the interest. Unfortunately, up to this point, the travel industry and tourists haven’t had a common framework to let them know if they’re living up to that maxim,” he said.
He then promised that a new “Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria” would change that. Turner honored his pledge through his own United Nations Foundation, which has a small project on tourism. Along with the Rainforest Alliance, the United Nations Environment Programme and the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the U.N. Foundation was crafting the criteria.
Erika Harms, the foundation’s tourism expert and the force behind the criteria project, was named the executive director. When I asked her how she became interested in tourism, she said it came naturally—she was from Costa Rica.
“We grew up seeing tourism in a different light. Ecotourism was in its nascent state then. It meant no trashing a place. Instead, it was ‘go, see, help preserve these pristine places.’ Originally it was pitched to backpackers. Spartan small hotels with plumbing and electricity fulfilled your basic needs with no luxury. Families prepared the meals. There were no restaurants per se,” she said.
Harms earned a law degree in Costa Rica, and after working in business and as an environmental consultant, she moved to Washington as the deputy chief of mission and consul-general at the embassy of Costa Rica. Then she joined the U.N. Foundation.
Harms has zeroed in on the need to weed out the real ecotourist establishments from the fake. The average person looking for a responsible way to travel didn’t have a clue which claim was genuine.
“There were so many missing elements in certification programs before: culture, community, destination and habitat. You could destroy a mangrove to build your hotel and still receive a Green Globe certificate,” she told me in 2008 in the first of several interviews.
In September 2009, less than a year after the Barcelona announcement, Harms held a reception in Washington to celebrate its creation. “We developed the criteria with industry, always with industry. That is how we collaborate. It didn’t take that much money. . . . It was only about solutions,” she told me.
“The concept of tourism has changed with industrialization, yes, and standardization,” said Harms. “You don’t see any difference anymore between one place and another. It’s easier to build that way and provide standard service, but how can you preserve a sense of place and culture? The complexity of the tourism industry works against sustainability.”
“Unless you create some tie to a place and its people, you won’t have demand for sustainable tourism,” she continued. “Our certification program will help all tourists find the places that are still authentic.”
That sounds high-minded and slightly boring. It is the opposite. Behind the phrase “sustainable tourism” is the wish to keep all of the intriguing, messy and exotic differences in the world. The rules and regulations of sustainable tourism are meant, ironically, to avoid a world that looks the same.
The criteria for certification were unveiled, reviewed and revised by 2011, with nearly universal praise. That was the criteria I used to evaluate our voyage in Costa Rica.
Business understands the value of that label. People will search for it and often pay more money for its reassurance, which means big profits can be made by being on the ground floor in the certification scramble. “We are more like the police that recognize and enforce the standards,” said Janice Lichtenwald of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.
Companies are lining up to become official certifiers. Green Globe, which is privately owned, has already adopted the sustainable tourism standards and hopes to be able to certify hotels with the “Global Sustainable” label.
“Green Globe and other companies will make money from this, yes they will,” said Lichtenwald. “There is a consumer desire for labeling—they expect it.”
Hotels, resorts and tour operators are willing to pay companies to certify they are on the side of the angels, that visitors on vacation know they are not destroying the environment, or playing on a golf course that had been home to poor peasants a year earlier.
• • •
This drive for certification and sustainable tourism grew out of the environmental movement. The leaders of the ecotourism, or sustainable tourism, movement are not the fire-breathing types. There is no one like Ralph Nader, who stubbornly forced the government to demand safety features in the automobile industry. The tourism reformers are professors, writers and tour operators who wield ideas, gently. They write, lead groups, give awards and, when asked, will help a country, a community or a hotel figure out responsible tourism. One of their biggest difficulties is to explain that tourism is the classic double-edged sword that, unless properly managed, can ruin a place as easily as save it.
Over the last two decades, several tourism activists saw the gross problems that tourism was creating in the hyperactive world of cheap travel and the Internet. Jonathan Tourtellot, writer and editor at National Geographic, coined the term “geotourism.”
Tourtellot was familiar with the work of Héctor Caballos-Lascuráin, the Mexican who coined the term “ecotourism” to describe using tourism to enjoy and protect relatively undisturbed natural areas. Tourtellot wanted to broaden the concept to protect destinations in a holistic fashion—its people, culture and society as well as its natural landscape. “Geotourism” fit the bill, he thought, a name that encompassed the globe. He defined it as travel that “sustains or enhances the geographical character of a place—its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage, and the well-being of its residents.”
“The industry had become all about promoting tourism and very little about stewardship. I wanted to go back to the origins of tourism—meaning to tour, to see and appreciate what is already there, the local culture, the sense of that particular place,” said Tourtellot. “Tourism today is about resorts, spas, golf courses and theme parks that were built to bring in tourists and was subverting the very idea of place,” said Tourtellot.
He founded the National Geographic’s Center for Sustainable Destinations. Then he wrote a Geotourism Charter in 2006 with a set of “stewardship principles” for destinations to adopt. In the first years Honduras, Norway, Guatemala, the Douro Valley in Portugal and the City of Montreal asked to sign on to the program. He also helped create a Geotourism Map Guide program in which locals submitted their thoughts about what was most attractive about their locales for tourists and then created a map and blueprint for sustainable tourism development.
Tourtellot’s most controversial move was to break the tourism taboo and print articles describing the worst as well as the best of tourism. And he published the list in the National Geographic Traveler; it was hard to miss. Tourtellot and his colleagues decided to select a theme every year; for instance, coastal areas. Then they polled hundreds of experts to decide which are the best and worst shores in the world, or which are the best- and the worst-kept World Heritage destinations, or which are the best- or worst-kept national parks.
For the first time in anyone’s memory, famous destinations were graded professionally and the results published as the cover story of the November/December 2010 issue of the Traveler. Georgia’s Sea Islands were on the top and South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach at the bottom. South Carolina’s newspapers published the findings and deplored that their sandy strand was declared one of the world’s worst along with crowded, foul beaches in Vietnam and Spain.
Don Hawkins, a respected tourism professor at George Washington University, told me that he first thought Tourtellot had overstepped the boundaries. Then he saw the reaction and changed his mind. “The Thai tourism authority asked, ‘How can we fix this?’ And they did. It worked.”
Tourtellot and the National Geographic teamed up with the Ashoka Changemakers organization to create a “geotourism award.” I attended the first-ever award ceremony, hosted by Tourtellot. The geotourism prize comes with a $5,000 check for each of the three winners for transforming tourism to “celebrate places and change lives.”
The auditorium at the National Geographic headquarters was packed with tour operators and hoteliers and students from around the globe. The general public had voted online for the finalists. The atmosphere was a cross between the Academy Awards and student civics prizes. For me one of the lessons from the event was the supremacy of Costa Rica as a superpower of responsible tourists. That first year the top winners came from Costa Rica, Nepal and Ecuador. The finalists included tour groups from Bhutan, Tanzania, Thailand and Latvia. Two years later, the theme in 2011 was tourism “on the edge” or saving fresh water and coastal destinations from degradation. Once again one of the three top winners came from Costa Rica.
Martha Honey is another early activist who credits Costa Rica for her lifelong passion for ecotourism. A journalist, she lived with her family in Costa Rica in the 1970s and eventually wrote the book Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise? which explores sustainable-tourism policies around the globe. As cofounder and codirector of the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), Honey oversees research and convenes conferences on responsible tourism. She also has become a leading figure in “philanthropy tourism,” which encourages tourists to give back to the people and places through donations and volunteer work. Her ideas have gone mainstream, encouraging new philanthropy and funneling volunteers to established programs like Habitat for Humanity which builds homes around the globe.
She said the first question she asks about tourism is “Who benefits?” Too often the answer is not the local people.
“The big worry today is the conglomerates and hotel chains that are consolidating more and more. The Internet is countering that power by making a more equal playing field.”
Honey welcomes the push for a sustainable-tourism label and new criteria but warns that “the problem is the programs are all voluntary.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, Harold Goodwin is something of an éminence grise of the sustainable-tourism movement with a different vision. He prefers to work directly within the industry to effect change, eschewing outside activism. As a professor, he founded the International Centre for Responsible Tourism at Leeds Metropolitan University in Britain and is a familiar figure on the international conference circuit.
His inspiration is Jost Krippendorf, a Swiss academic who examined the politics of tourism in the 1970s and argued that the industry needed to help the environment, culture and local communities. Goodwin believes that there is no single global industry. “There is not an international market for tourism,” he wrote to me in an email exchange.
Goodwin argues that sustainable tourism has to be created in “each originating market,” or the homes of the tourists. In other words, educate the tourists and the companies they use to travel. To that end, Goodwin concentrates on working with the industry and governments and not with nonprofit groups or activists. “The private sector is achieving far more than the NGOs,” he wrote, dismissing programs such as community-based tourism, ecotourism, carbon offsetting, global sustainable-tourism criteria as “superficially attractive” but unproven.
Through his teaching, Goodwin says he has trained tourism professionals who work around the world to transform the industry from within by creating tourist operations that put sustainability into practice. He gives Responsible Tourism awards to what he considers good examples of responsible tourism. He also hosts an online forum called Irresponsible Tourism where people can complain about the bad apples.
• • •
The tented auditorium was draped with ropes of fresh branches. The Brazilian night had fallen and strings of lights sparkled in the cool evening. Columns holding up the tent were covered in leaves, fruits, flowers and more branches. Dirt swirled on the floor. The motif was Amazon rainforest. The glittering invitation-only gathering was the 9th Annual Summit of the World Travel and Tourism Council, held in May 2009 in Florianópolis, Brazil.
The dinner crowd included the titans of the tourism industry, who mingled with the political elite from Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa. As they gathered at the buffet lines, the guests resembled a society photograph in a glossy magazine: well dressed, well heeled and enough beauties, both male and female, to create a buzz. This was the annual summit of the movers and shakers, and the theme behind the rainforest décor was responsible, sustainable tourism and green tourism. In the buffet line I met Thea Chiesa, of the World Economic Forum of Geneva; at dinner Costas Christ, chairman of the judges of Tourism for Tomorrow Awards. The industry definitely saw itself as protectors of the planet, not exploiters.
This is the organization founded in 1991 by James Robinson III, the CEO of American Express, who teamed up with the U.N. World Tourism Organization to produce the Satellite Accounts system that governments use to measure income from tourism.
At the time of the Brazil conference, the satellite system reported that the industry contributed $5.474 trillion to the world economy in 2009, more than 9 percent of the world’s GDP and the biggest employer in the world with 235 million jobs. (Academics and economists dispute some of the industry’s claims, although most agree that tourism is the largest service sector industry and the largest employer.)
Some of those attending were government tourism directors from China and South Africa; the secretary-general of the United Nations World Tourism Organization, and business executives from American Express, Carlson Hotels, Accor Hotels, IBM, Orbitz, Marriott, Gap Adventures, Jones Lang LaSalle, Abercrombie & Kent, the Jumeirah Group and Silversea Cruises.
At the conference the industry leaders spoke as if they were leading the charge toward reform. Green was the theme. It was held at Costão do Santinho, a luxury resort on Brazil’s Atlantic Coast, with a nod to Brazil’s rainforest. The WTTC Tourism for Tomorrow Awards for best sustainable-tourism practices were integrated into the annual conference for the first time.
I was able to attend the conference thanks to Kathleen Matthews, Marriott’s executive vice president for global communication and public affairs. We started out together as young journalists in Washington—she was an ABC television correspondent at the local Washington station when I was a Washington Post reporter covering local politics. Now she is an advocate of sustainable tourism within the industry. When I first interviewed her about Marriott and tourism, she said she couldn’t keep up with all of the requests she received from the tourism reformers to meet with their groups.
Marriott was one of three finalists for the top prize of Global Tourism Business Award at the WTTC conference. The company’s entry was its underwriting of more than 1.4 million acres of pristine protected Brazilian rainforest to offset the carbon emitted in the corporation’s daily business—part of its evolving sustainable-tourism program to alter how the company administers its 3,000 Marriott hotels to improve the environment.
The awards ceremonies were dazzling. Rajan Datan, a BBC television host who appears on the program Rough Guide to the World, roamed the stage as if this were a deluxe variety show, introducing each of the nominees and showing videos of their accomplishments. Spotlights crisscrossed the hall as the winners were announced with applause and smiles.
Marriott won the big prize. Accepting the award was Ed Fuller, president of Marriott International. In his acceptance speech and in his comments to reporters afterward, the Marriott executive sounded more like a reformer than the reformers. “We are very proud of our award for sustainable tourism. We are actually stewarding these 1.4 million acres of rainforest,” he said. “Clearly sustainability is the long-term strategy for tourism. It’s good business. And it is for everyone in the business. The focus of sustainability is to get everyone involved. Europe has been the leader. We have to do more.”
Interspersed with the awards were panels to discuss the state of tourism. The recession and its deeply unsettling bite into business was the top concern of the executives.
“After 9/11, political leaders asked everyone to travel again. We’re seeing the opposite now in this recession,” said Hubert Joly, president and CEO of Carlson, the hotel and hospitality corporation. He recounted how U.S. travel industry leaders had to plead for a meeting with President Obama in March to delicately request a more positive position on business travel and to underline how much travel and tourism contributes to the economy, especially during down times. Yet, said Joly, “none of the governments are including travel and tourism in the conversation about economic recovery.”
Fernando Pinto, the CEO of TAP Air Portugal, agreed. “We are the cash cows,” he said, expanding on the underlying theme that their business doesn’t receive the respect it deserves. The snubs from political leaders was a variation on the old insult that travel and tourism are frivolous pursuits and travel executives not serious businesspeople. And the answer to that quandary was the familiar refrain: “We have to act like an Industry—not like ‘Travel and Tourism,’ but we have to behave like an industry,” said Charles Petruccelli, president of Global Travel Services at American Express.
The environment was the second-most-talked-about issue. Unlike other environmental awards ceremonies, there was no overall consensus about how much the industry was responsible for the problem or how hard it was working to reverse environmental degradation. What the participants did agree on was that tourism depends on the health of the planet.
“If there are no monkeys, no birds, no rainforests, where would our tourists go?” said Alex Khajavi, the CEO of Naturegate, an airline and tourism company, when he accepted an award at the summit for innovative sustainable tourism. This was more than the expression of the triple bottom line. It was an acknowledgment that the planet may be a higher priority than profits.
A major political decision had already been taken when the now-hundred-member-strong WTTC selected Brazil as the site of the summit. It was the first time a South American country had been chosen for the prestigious gathering. Brazil, though, isn’t just a South American country. As one of the countries known collectively as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), it is one of the four major developing nations whose wealth is shifting the centers of power and influence around the world. And, with the conference’s emphasis on sustainable tourism and the environment, Brazil and its endangered Amazon Basin was an ideal choice.
Grateful for this honor, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opened up the conference with a stirring address. It was a singular performance by one of the sharpest leaders of this era. President Lula, as he is known, explained how the tourism summit would add weight to Brazil’s bid to hold the 2016 Summer Olympics. “This is the first in a series of events we intend to celebrate during the next eight years,” he told the crowd. “This event is being held in our continent for the very first time. In five years, we will host the FIFA World Cup and, with a little help from God, in 2016 we will host the Olympic Games.”
It is rare for the head of state to attend a WTTC summit, much less give the opening address. Three years earlier, when the summit was held in Washington, D.C., the WTTC was pleased to have Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice address the group. President Lula, though, knew what he was doing. He was flattering these influential business executives by elevating the WTTC meeting to the level of the Olympics. He said tourism deserved it. “I am saying this so that you understand we are not working in tourism because it is beautiful or because it helps us win elections. We intend to help the tourism industry because we understand it is an extraordinary industry for cultural, economic and social development.”
In the high-stakes lobbying campaign to host the Olympics, the president, a former labor organizer, was enlisting the elite of the travel industry—an essential partner at these sporting extravaganzas—to return to their capitals and spread the word that Brazil was worthy of hosting the 2016 summer games. Sports are an integral part of tourism. Few industries follow the bidding for international sport events like travel and tourism. It was of a piece with President Lula’s stubborn push to hoist Brazil into the top ranks of the world’s emerging powerhouses, and it worked. The executives could see for themselves that Brazil was capable of organizing a fabulous summit for them.
“A big embrace and thank-you,” said President Lula.
At the close of the summit Jean-Claude Baumgartner, the president of the WTTC and summit host, said he was pleased at the outcome. He had set the agenda: trends and crises in the industry, including fears of pandemics, and the special emphasis on sustainable tourism. A former Air France senior executive, Baumgartner said he saw tourism as a natural advocate for the environment.
“What is important now is that we get out of this economic crisis and that we protect our fragile planet,” he said. Baumgartner quietly slipped away with Ed Fuller, Marriott International president, after the summit and traveled 1,800 miles across Brazil to tour the Marriott-sponsored preserve. Thanks to Kathleen Matthews, I was able to travel with the group. The forest was over halfway across the enormous country. We flew four hours northeast to Manaus, the famous turn-of-the-twentieth-century rubber capital that lost its wealth when the British stole rubber plant seedlings and planted them in Malaysia. Now the legacy of that long-ago era is confined to the historic town center, especially the city’s century-old opera house. Today, Manaus is on the tourist map as the main jumping-off point for the Brazilian Amazon.
The next morning we climbed into small private planes and flew through thick layers of impossibly white clouds toward the rainforest preserve. Even though we were just south of the Equator, the air was moist and pure. The forest canopy grew green and thick as we left the city farther behind. When we landed on a small airstrip, I caught my breath in the clean tropical air. It was sweet and soft.
For the last leg of the journey we boarded speedboats. The sun had risen and blue skies stretched as far as we could see. I stopped counting the shades of green that defined the mangrove coves or the ropes of vines leading deeper and deeper into dense tropical forests. We saw no humans and no sign of humans.
The river was a tributary of the Amazon and seemed as wide as the Mississippi. Bird songs did battle with the roar of the outboard motor. Then we saw the settlement of the Juma Sustainable Development Preserve and our boat swerved over to the bank.
“Watch your step, hold on to the railings,” said Virgilio Viana, the director general of the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation and our host for the day. We still slipped, walking up the steep stairs on the riverbank, our first initiation into life in that humidity where everything is wet and slippery nearly all the time. The pungent jungle smell was a combination of smoke, wilderness and the cloying sweetness of decay. We walked through the small settlement in the jungle clearing, marching down the main street of red tropical soil, past simple new houses, a church, primary school, health clinic and a playground.
We reached the project campus, where Dr. Viana briefed us. A serious evolutionary biologist with the looks and showmanship of Francis Ford Coppola, Dr. Viana had cobbled together this vast preserve with the financial support of the state government of Amazonas and private industry—chiefly the Bradesco Bank of Brazil, the Yamamay clothing chain and now Marriott. He said he went to private industry for money because he needed a lot of cash and he didn’t have time to rely solely on foundations. (He does receive funding from a Spanish foundation.) The rainforest was disappearing too quickly.
“Until 2003 the state was handing out chain saws and encouraging people to clear the land and become farmers,” he said. “We haven’t had a lot of time to turn the situation around.”
The initial result was impressive: a 70 percent reduction in deforestation. A big reason for the success was the method. The native peoples are paid a salary to play their traditional role as “guardians of the forest.” They extract palm oil, harvest Brazil nuts and keep out anyone trying to cut down the trees.
“There are sixty-six indigenous groups here, only two are dangerous, and many different realities,” said Dr. Viana. “Ethically and morally they should be paid for their environmental services. That’s our approach—education and income, not policing.”
After a lunch of grilled local river fish that melted in our mouths, we walked a few paces into the rainforest with several local foresters. “Dense” doesn’t begin to describe how every centimeter teems with life. Thick trees climb so high into the sky I couldn’t see their tops. Ferns and vines crisscross the bushes and trees in no pattern. We tucked our pants into our socks to keep out critters.
We stopped in front of a particularly thick, tall tree, and the men gathered bowling-ball-size nuts that had dropped from its branches. With an impressive knife, one of the foresters cut open the shell and out fell a dozen or so Brazil nuts. He took one, sliced off the thick skin and gave it to me to eat. It was soft and sweet like the meat of a coconut, with the taste of a scented fruit. Not at all like the Brazil nuts that we crack open at Christmastime. Another group arrived. This time they were visitors from Mozambique, also foresters who shared the same colonial language of Portuguese and the same imperative to save their tropical forests. They were taking notes.
After an hour we headed back to the compound, where the adults were making handicrafts and the children studying in their common room. We had to leave before sunset. Fuller said Bill Marriott was attracted by the enormity of this vision and by Dr. Viana’s modern business approach. After a thorough review by independent accountants Marriott contributed an initial $2 million to the project. It will never become a tourist resort or provide any income for the corporation.
“This preserve works. It does what it says it would do and offsets some of our carbon footprint,” said Mr. Fuller. That matter-of-fact appraisal reflects the consensus among the elite ranks of the industry that tourism has to improve its environmental record.
We trod carefully down the permanently damp stairs and climbed back into the boats. As we pulled out, a flock of parakeets rose above the trees, their cries echoing unimpeded in silence. In that clean evening sky, the sun turned a blood-orange before it disappeared behind the curve of the earth.
• • •
Brazil won in its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. The games will be held in South America for the first time, in Rio de Janeiro. There was no doubt about Brazil’s commitment to visitors and tourism. President Lula wept at the announcement, saying, “Today is the most emotional day in my life, the most exciting day of my life.”
The Juma Reserve has won official recognition by the United Nations REDD program to reduce carbon emission from deforestation and forest degradation. Marriott has helped build seven community schools in the reserve and is funding more programs through contributions from Marriott hotels in Brazil.
The tourism industry continues to give awards: for best hotel advertisements, websites, package tours, country destination, theme park advertisement, resort brochure and now for protecting the environment and culture. The World Travel and Tourism Council’s Tourism for Tomorrow Awards that Marriott won are the equivalent of an Oscar. The Condé Nast Traveler magazine gives World Savers Awards for social responsibility in education, health, poverty, preservation, wildlife and the top prize for “doing it all.”
Prizes aside, the industry will have to have a 25 percent adherence to those standards before it gets close to fulfilling the promises of “green vacations.”